Village People

Alex Garland gets surreal in Men, his latest twist on the horror genre

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AFTER A BRIEF sojourn in streaming television with Devs, writer/director Alex Garland is back to cinematic storytelling with his latest Men, a thoughtful yet challenging exploration of horror, myth and toxic masculinity.

It stars Jessie Buckley as Harper, a recently widowed woman who goes to the countryside to process what she's just been through. In an English village, she rents an extremely well-appointed house for two weeks, and runs into several of the local male residents (all played by Rory Kinnear) who each have a disturbing impact on her stay.

Garland crafted Men to have several possible paths of interpretation, as Harper wrestles with remembering the traumatic day of the death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu). Asked how he labels it, Garland tells Red Alert, "It is a horror film, but it's also not. It uses some horror tropes and genre conventions, and then not others, I suppose."

Men does indeed use many of the methods of genre storytelling, from folk horror to body horror, as Harper works through her grief and anger. Placing her in such a gorgeous manor surrounded by lush fields and old-growth forests, Garland says it was a journey itself to figure out where one might want to go in order to process something of the sort that Harper is dealing with.